Samadhi is relevant now more than ever. We are at a time in history, where we’ve not only forgotten samadhi, but we’ve forgotten what we forgot. This forgetting is Maya, the illusion of the self. As humans, most of us live immersed in our daily lives with little thought of who we are, why we are here or where we are going? Most of us have never realized the true self, the soul, or what the Buddha called annata, that which is beyond name and form, beyond thinking. As a result, we believe we are these limited bodies.

We live in fear, either conscious or inconscious, that the limited self structure that we are identified with will die. In today’s world, the vast majority of people who are engaged in religious or spiritual practices, such as yoga, prayer, meditation, chanting or any kind of ritual are practical technics which are conditioned, which means they are just part of the ego construct. The seeking and the activity isn’t the problem. Thinking you have found the answer in some external form is the problem.

Spirituality in its most common form is no different than pathological thinking that is going on everywhere. It is further agitation of the mind, more human doing as opposed to human being. The ego construct wants more money, more power, more love, more of everything. Those on the so-called spiritual path desire to be more spiritual, more awake, more equanimous, more peaceful, more enlightened.

Wherever there is a desire to attain something, you can be sure it’s the ego construct that work. Samadhi is not about attaining or add something more to yourself. To realize Samadhi is to learn to die before you die. Life and death are like yin and yang, an inseparable continuing, endlessly enfolding with no beginning and no end.

When we push away death, we also push away life. When you experience the truth directly of who you are, there is no longer any fear of life or death. We are told who we are by our society and our culture. And at the same time, we are slaves to the deeper unconscious biological craving and inversion that governs our choices.

The ego construct is nothing more than the impulse to repeat. It’s simply the path that energy once took and the tendency for the energy to take that path again whether it is positive or negative for the organism.

There are endless levels of memory or mind, spirals within spirals. When your consciousness identifies with this mind or ego construct, it ties you to social conditioning, which you can call the matrix.There are aspects of the ego that we can be conscious of, but it’s the unconscious, the archaic quiring, the primal existential fears that are actually driving the whole machine.

Endless patterns of grasping towards pleasure and in avoidance of pain are sublimated into pathological behaviors. Our work, our relationships, our believes, our very thoughts, and our whole way of living. Like cattle, most humans live and die in path of subjugation, feeling their lives to the matrix.

We live lives locked into narrow patterns, lives often filled with great suffering, and that never occurs to us that we can actually become free. It is possible to let go of the life that has been inherited from the past. To live the one that is waiting to come forth through the inner world.

We were all born into this world with biological condition’s structures, but without self awareness. Often when you look into a young child’s eyes, there’s no trace of self only luminous emptiness. The person one grows into a mask or over-consciousness. Shakespeare said all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players.

In an awakened individual, consciousness shines through the personality, through the mask. When you are awake, you don’t become identified with your character. You don’t believe that you are the masks that you are wearing. But nor do you give up playing a role. When we are identified with our character, our persona, this is Maya - the illusion of the self. Samadhi is awakening from the dream of your character in the play of life.

2400 years after Plato wrote the republic, humanity is still making its way out of Plato’s cave. In fact, we maybe more transfixed by illusions than ever. Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who live and chained in a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. All they could see were shadows projected on the wall by the things passing in front of fire, which was behind them. This puppet show become their world. According to Socrates, the shadows were as close as the prisoner would ever get to see in reality. Even after being told about the outside world, they continued to believe that shadows were all that is. Even if they suspected that there were something more, they were unwilling to leave what was familiar.

Humanity today is like the people who have only seen the shadows on the cave wall. The shadows are analogs to our thoughts. The world of thinking is the only world that we know, but there’s another world that’s beyond thinking.